(no subject)

[unbibium]

I just finished watching the Discovery Channel's special, "Alien Planet", in which we see the story of a fictional future deep space probe, landing on a living planet.

I do have some criticism about the scientists' commentary -- one of them talks about one of the animals evolving from a four-legged animal into a two-legged one by its forelegs and hind legs fusing together, and how we'd never predict such a thing on Earth.  But we don't get to hear why such an animal might thrive on another planet.

It does make me think about the reality of offworld contact, in a way that the Enterprise finale didn't.  After all, most science fiction you see on TV deals with creatures that either look vaguely human, or utilize human form in some way that's budget-friendly.  Many such productions go so far as to assume that humans and aliens can interbreed, fall in love with each other, or at least fuck every now and then.  And last night's Enterprise gave us the contrivance of a human-Vulcan binary clone, grown by some xenophobe group, who resented the presence of aliens walking the streets of Earth.  Such xenophobia might not evolve, or may take different forms, if aliens never physically reach Earth, can't survive on Earth's surface, or at least have smaller dicks than humans.

So our current model of the universe suggests that our contact with other planets will consist of either radio contact through SETI, or by launching a probe and waiting fifty years.  We'll probably decide that alien invasion is a far lesser risk than a nuclear holocaust started by humans.  And at that point, a free information exchange begins. 

Our contribution to the universe will probably be to popularize the Knight's jump as a move in board games.  So we'd better hope the first race we contact doesn't look like horses, because not only will they take credit for it, but everyone on our planet will assume that they're better hung.

Comments

[jakesbrain.livejournal.com]

Ever read Stanislaw Lem's original SOLARIS? Pretty pedantic, has a lot of fake scientific arguing back and forth recounted by the narrator, all centered around attempts to communicate with an alien life form... but when you get down to it, what the author is arguing by presetning all the scientific claptrap is that given the possibility that alien lifeforms do exist, maybe even sentient ones, the differences between us and them may be too great for us to communicate meaningfully in any fashion. Of course we're not going to be able to interbreed with them, but Lem's belief is that we might never even be able to TALK to them.